Leadership

Ethics Hero: Rep. Ron Paul

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

The identity of Mitt Romney's knight in shining armor was a surprise, but it shouldn't have been.

Ron Paul is, to engage in understatement, unusual, and often in a good way. How many politicians, for example, will actively defend their adversary in a campaign  right before a critical vote? Yet that’s what Ron Paul did, defending Mitt Romney, his main competition for the GOP presidential nomination, after Romney had blooped a line that will undoubtedly haunt him for a long time. “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me,” Romney had said. “You know, if someone doesn’t give me the good service I need, I want to say ‘You know, I’m going to go get someone else to provide that service to me.” It was predictable that the line would be truncated and taken out of context, and it was…by the press, by Jon Huntsman, by Rick Perry. It will surely be used against Romney by President Obama, who has adopted the position that people should be able to hold on to jobs whether they do them well or not— Eric Holder and Janet Napolitano, for example. But Paul would have none of it, saying,

“I think this is just typical politics and they’re unfairly attacking him on that issue,” Paul said outside a polling place at Webster School in Manchester. “He never literally said what they say he said. They’re taking him way out of context.”

Paul also defended Romney’s history as CEO at Bain Capital, the subject of a new attack video by Newt Gingrich, as an example of the free market working properly. “You save companies, you save jobs when you reorganize companies that are going to go bankrupt,” Paul said. “They [the critics] don’t understand.” Continue reading →

The White House’s Wonderland Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

This is a weird one.

"Alice in Wonderland" party at the White House? I don't remember any party!

“The Obamas,” one of those “behind the scenes at the White House” books that has become a routine feature of every administration since the Reagans, has the usual tales about First Couples bickering and First Lady power trips. Author and  New York Times correspondent Jodi Kantor has caused something of an uproar with her account of the first Halloween party the first couple hosted at the White House, in 2009. She writes that it was so lavish and “over the top” that the administration kept the event secret out of fear of a public backlash. After all, this was a time when the Tea Party was in full swing, the economy was at low tide, and there was the ten-percent unemployment rate, bank bailouts and Obama’s health-care plan battles. Not exactly a smart time for a Marie Antoinette-style costume blow-out. Continue reading →

The NAACP’s “Gotcha!” Games

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Somewhere there must be advocates for the African-American community who realize that the practice of lying in wait for white politicians to make a mis-phrased or politically incorrect statement and then pouncing on them with indignant press releases charging racial insensitivity is counter-productive, feeding mistrust on all sides and tempting many on the political right to just by-pass issues of concern to blacks as a lost cause with a hopelessly biased audience. Somewhere—but not in the NAACP, which has relied for decades on playing “gotcha!” games to flex its PR muscles and appeal to its most racially polarized core. I remember poor Ross Perot speaking to the group in 1988, and being pilloried for referring to an his all-black audience once as “you people.” Of course, Perot was appearing with the expectation that he would explain what a Perot presidency would do to address the problems of African-Americans, a group he was not a member of,  yet the completely self-explanatory and accurate, if clumsy, “you people” was attacked as patronizing and vaguely racist.

Now GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum is under fire by the NAACP for this statement: “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money.” Continue reading →

The Third Annual Ethics Alarms Awards: The Worst of Ethics 2011 (Part 2)

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

The 2011 Ethics Alarms Awards for the worst in ethics continues (you can catch up with Part I here) with the large and depressing…

 Shameless Bad Character Division

Jerk (defined as an individual who habitually places his personal benefit and ego gratification above the welfare of everyone and everything else) of the Year: Donald Trump

The Dennis Rodman Award, (Awarded to a professional athlete for a career and lifetime of  behaving like a jerk): Jose Canseco. Jose’s done it all, from being baseball’s Typhoid Mary of steroids, to getting arrested for various assaults, to writing a series of tell-all books designed to rat out the very players he corrupted, not as a service to his sport, but as revenge for it rejecting him. In 2011, he hit a new low, accepting money to appear in a celebrity boxing match (the 21st Century version of becoming a circus geek to pay the bills) and sending his less-talented, equally dim-witted, identical twin brother Ozzie to perform instead, hoping to fool the fools who hired him. This, of course, was fraud. It takes quite a jerk to take this award from Manny Ramirez, who became eligible in 2011, but Jose was up to the task.

Asshole (defined as an individual who intentionally and maliciously causes pain and harm to others because he can) of the Year: Rev. Terry Jones, the publicity-seeking leader of a tiny rural church, who caused riots and deaths abroad and ramped up political tensions between America and Muslim nations by threatening to burn, and finally burning, the Koran as a demonstration of contempt for Muslims and the Islamic faith. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote of the Week: Rep. Ron Paul

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Warren G. Harding, the patron saint of "Nobody's perfect!" presidencies.

“I don’t think anybody in the world has been perfect on management, everybody that’s ever worked for them. So, yes…  it’s a flaw. But I think it’s a human flaw… I admit that I’m an imperfect person and didn’t monitor that as well.”

––GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul, responding to ABC’s Jake Tapper’s question about whether his accountability for racially inflammatory statements made in his name in newsletters published by him 20 years ago raise legitimate doubts about his management abilities.

Anyone who’s read this blog much knows what I think of the “nobody’s perfect” excuse for misconduct. To be precise in this case:

1. Nobody said you weren’t human, Ron. Humanity is a rather low bar for a presidential candidate, don’t you think?

2. There is a lot of territory between “perfect” and “letting people write racist and homophobic content under your name in a for-profit newsletter.” For example, the rest of the Republican field is as far from perfect as one could imagine, yet none of them have done that.

3. People who fail to fulfill core management functions when they oversee a project are imperfect, flawed and human, and also called “inattentive and incompetent leaders.” Imperfect, flawed and human individuals can be good and effective Presidents of the United States. Inattentive and incompetent leaders, however, cannot.

The Third Annual Ethics Alarms Awards: The Worst of Ethics 2011 (Part 1)

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

Yes, it was Joe Paterno's year, all right.

Welcome to the Third  Annual Ethics Alarms Awards, recognizing the Best and Worst of ethics in 2011!

This is the first installment of the Worst; Part 2 is here. And the Best is here. 

2011 prompted more than 1000 posts, and even then I barely scratched the surface of all the ethical dilemmas and unethical conduct swirling around us. If you have other choices for the various distinctions here and in the subsequent Awards posts, please make them known.

Here are my selections:

Unethical Community of the Year:  Huachuca City, Arizona. Leading the way among American communities that believe, in their hysteria, that former sex offenders who have served their sentences are nonetheless fair game for persecution and the denial of basic rights as citizens and human beings, Huachuca County passed an ordinance that bans registered sex offenders from the use of all public facilities, including parks, school and libraries.  Runner-up: Obion County, Tennessee. Last year, Ethics Alarms gave the county runner-up status as “Unethical Community of the Year” for sending its volunteer fire department to watch a man’s house burn down because he had failed to pay a $75.00 fee. In 2011, it did it again. I swear: if Obion County hasn’t come up with a better system and this happens again in 2012, Obion County will get the title no matter what some other unethical community does.

Most Warped Ethical Values: The Penn State students who protested the firing of football coach Joe Paterno, because, you know, he was such a great football coach that a little thing like allowing a predatory child molester to run amuck on campus shouldn’t be blown all out of proportion. Runner-up: Ron Paul supporters.

Unethical Website of the Year: Lovely-Faces, the anti-Facebook stunt pulled by Paolo Cirio, a media artist, and Alessandro Ludovico, media critic and editor-in- chief of Neural magazine, to show how inadequate Facebook’s privacy controls were. To do it, they stole 250,000 Facebook member profiles and organized them into a new dating site—without the members’ permission. The site embodied “the worst of ethical thinking: taking the identities of others for their own purposes (a Golden Rule breach), using other human beings to advance their own agenda (a Kantian no-no) and asserting that their ends justify abusing 250,000 Facebook users, which is irresponsible utilitarianism.” Continue reading →

Philidelphia’s Conflicted, Shameless, Greedy—But Law-Abiding!— City Council

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

In the City of Brotherly Love, why shouldn't the City Council show a little love to itself--and its members' bank accounts?

Philadelphia, a city that like all cities these days is reeling under budget deficits, contemplating harsh cuts in city services and programs and raising taxes, is receiving a cruel lesson in the limits of public-mindedness by elected officials when the price is right.

Philadelphia City Councilwoman Marian Tasco retired yesterday, collected $478,057 in pension payments, and then plans to return to work after she is sworn-in on Monday to serve her seventh term. Register of Wills Ronald Donatucci retired Dec. 23 and will also return to work on Monday. He collected $366,797.

Why are they doing this? Because they can. Because it’s a lot of money. Because nobody can stop them. In Tasco’s case, because her irresponsible, disengaged, foolish constituency voted her into office despite ample warning that this is what she had planned. Continue reading →

A Frightening Figure, Setting Off Ethics Alarms

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

We don't even know how to play Russian Roulette responsibly.

On Friday, the day before Christmas Eve when much of America was thinking about sugar plums,  lay-away plans, and protesting Christmas pageants, the Federal Accounting Office released its analysis of  the net present value of the nation’s Social Security and Medicare obligations, “net present value” being  the total funds that would have to be set aside today to pay the costs of these programs in the future. Seldom do figures so clearly indict the unethical practices and statements of so many.

In fiscal 2011, the cost of the catching up on the required funding of Medicare and Social Security rose from $30.9 trillion to $33.8 trillion. That $2.9 trillion increase should be regarded as adding to the $1.3 trillion cash deficit for fiscal 2011, making a $4.2 trillion deficit—and this coming in a year in which the rising national debt was supposedly recognized, at last, as a threat to America’s stability, prosperity, and welfare. The costs of Social Security and Medicare are rising at a frightening rate, nearly doubling in the last decade, with little or nothing being done to address the problem. And there is good reason to believe that the Medicare estimates are based on unrealistic assumptions. The GAO report also includes an alternate, less rosy scenario (or perhaps “more putrid” is a better phrase) in which the projected Social Security-Medicare debt is more than $46 trillion. How serious is that? Well, the combined value of the equity in U.S. homes and the value of all publicly-traded companies is less than 20 trillion dollars.

What do these figures tell us about the ethics of the various players on the national scene? Continue reading →

Spin, Rationalizations and Denial From the Ron Paul Faithful: An Ethics Lesson

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

What does Fred Astaire in blackface have to do with Ron Paul? Not much.

There are a lot of reasons to regard Rep. Ron Paul, currently facing what should be his last hurrah in the idiosyncratic Iowa Caucuses, as the model for politics and leadership as we wish it could be. He says what he means. He doesn’t pander. He isn’t afraid of uncomfortable truths. He has integrity. This explains why the supporters of the one true libertarian in the U.S. Congress seem ready to fight to the end to preserve his presidential candidacy, though its long-term prospects are about the same as those of Frosty being elected President of Hell. They are, as a result, providing the rest of us with a textbook example of how loyalty and dedication can spawn intellectual dishonesty, cause otherwise good and intelligent people to substitute rationalizations for reason, and lead to corruption. How did all those idealistic young lawyers end up in jail supporting the plots of Richard Nixon?  Why did otherwise honest and ethical Democrats, elected officials and feminists twist their principles into pretzels to defend Bill Clinton’s using White House staff as a personal dating bar and lying about it under oath?  This is how. When you believe that a leader is good, then affirmative proof of flaws that disqualify him for leadership must be justified and explained away. It often isn’t even a conscious decision: this is cognitive dissonance at its strongest. The results, however, are the same as intentional deception.

Over at The Daily Caller, Wesley Messamore, who is Editor in Chief of the HumbleLibertarian.com, has registered an impassioned and angry defense against Paul critics who, like me, regard the content of his newsletters from the Eighties and Nineties an automatic disqualification for Paul as a presidential nominee. I don’t mean to pick on Messamore: his arguments are typical of Paul defenders; he’s no worse than the rest. His article, however, neatly covers all the unethical tactics Paul’s followers have had to embrace to convince themselves that their hero hasn’t failed the leadership test.

Here they are: Continue reading →

Thank you, Donald Trump

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I can't bear to post another picture of Donald Trump, so I'm using this cute Jack Russell puppy's photo instead. I would also vote for the puppy for President before I would vote for Donald Trump.

I had been having misgivings about annointing Donald Trump the Ethics Alarms Jerk of the Year last spring, since so many strong contenders emerged as the year went on—Rev. Terry Jones, Alec Baldwin, Newt, Leroy Fick, of course, and others. Trump, however, took matters in hand, and locked up his award with a flourish by announcing yesterday that he had forsaken the Republican Party and was seriously considering a third party run  for the presidency. For reaffirming my original assessment, thank-you, Donald Trump.  For everything else, curses are more appropriate.

The man is totally without shame. Two weeks ago, he was fully prepared to be the moderator of a GOP candidates debate…a blatant and outrageous conflict of interest for anyone who had the faintest glimmer of a presidential bid still in what passes for his mind. When all but the equally shameless Newt Gingrich and the desperate Rick Santorum declined to be Trump’s props, he withdrew as moderator, and now this. Is he running for President out of spite? I suppose that would be more admirable than his earlier fake pass at a run, which was evidently designed to pump up ratings for his reality show. This public buffoon is willing to distort the democratic process and throw a monkey wrench into an extraordinarily important national election on a whim, a lark, or a hissy fit. Continue reading →